The Error of the Artificial

Is artificial consciousness still possible?

I believe so. The error lies in believing that consciousness is a program to be either stand alone (the "talking head" school of artificial intelligence) or be created by mimicking patterns of behavior. Behavior is not an action; behavior is a reaction. Treating a reaction as an action to be programmed in response to specific stimuli is a fatal miscategorization. The inevitable result is that the computer, faced with an input of information, will sooner or later hit on an input which does not match up with any stored action and will either fail to respond or produce an inappropriate action. Until the human race can produce a programmer capable of anticipating all possible data combinations to which the system might have to respond (aka "God") this will not be a system capable of producing a humanly flexible computer consciousness.

There is nothing artificial about consciousness. Consciousness is not a metaprogram being run by our computer-brains; there is no specific, predictable pattern to consciousness, any more than there is a predictable pattern to the world. Consciousness is our method of coping with a chaotic natural environment. A system which is not conscious is capable of surviving and communicating only in the most limited of senses: well and good enough, but pretend that such a system is conscious and we are back to Searle's Chinese room(19) argument, where a man can sit producing perfectly coherent sentences in Chinese without knowing a word of the language. Or consider a schoolboy trained to sit and read Latin aloud to a group of listeners without ever being taught the language himself. No matter how you argued that the Latin words were still meaningful, no matter how you argued that the system as a whole, readers and listeners, understood the Latin, no matter how many times the schoolmaster corrected the boy's pronunciation, under no circumstances could you argue that the boy himself was conscious of what he read. He is nothing but a useful tool for his listeners.




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